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As a fiscal exercise, today’s Spending Review was of only modest importance. Setting out the Coalition’s plans for the lone financial year of 2015-16, George Osborne shaved £11.5 billion off the bill to the taxpayer. Every pound saved was hard-won —with “fairness and resolve” — but this was not a grand blueprint to compare with its predecessor in 2010.

Politically, however, the Chancellor’s statement was of the highest significance. It was a progress report upon the Coalition’s deficit reduction programme, an inventory of statistics to support Osborne’s central contention that “Britain is moving from rescue to recovery” and — most important of all — a navigational device “to secure that recovery”.

The salient feature of the period addressed today is that it will include a general election — on May 7, 2015. Therein lay the audacity of Osborne’s speech: it was less an admission of failure than a plan of action for the first months of the next Parliament, a road map stretching months beyond the vistas of the present Coalition and into the great unknown prairies that lie beyond polling day. It invited the voters to look past the election and — as the Chancellor rattled off his announcements — to consider which team they really want in Downing Street.

However they answer, the cuts will continue. Osborne’s core claim was that parsimony will be matched by investment. As he put it, the dividend of austerity will be “a long-term infrastructure plan to power Britain back into the economic premier league. We’re saving on welfare and waste to invest in the roads and railways, schooling and science.” There will also be a council tax freeze for two further years.

By this stage of the electoral cycle, all politics, however statesmanlike, is campaigning in nature. To grasp what Osborne was up to today, one must first acknowledge that the defining moment of this Parliament was the 2011 Autumn Statement. In that speech, the Chancellor acknowledged that he was not going to wipe out the structural deficit before the next election, and that additional savings would be needed beyond 2015. Remarkably, the Lib-Dems went along with this, persuaded by the steely pragmatism of Osborne’s Chief Secretary and wingman, Danny Alexander (to whom he paid warm tribute yesterday).

This matters because it explains what happened today, 19 months on. The Tory pitch at the next election will not be: “Job done, please reward us.” It will be: “Lots done, lots left to do.” In this context, David Cameron was deeply impressed by Bill Clinton’s speech to the Democratic Convention in Charlotte, North Carolina, last September, and has encouraged his lieutenants to study the text closely.

“President Obama started with a much weaker economy than I did,” said Clinton. “No President — not me or any of my predecessors — could have repaired all the damage in just four years. But conditions are improving and if you’ll renew the President’s contract, you will feel it.” Amend the name and job title appropriately and you have Cameron’s claim to another five years — a political claim that underpinned every sentence of Osborne’s fiscal review today.

Now that both main parties accept that austerity will stretch into the next Parliament, the election has become a contest between their respective priorities. The word “values”, so often used in the past by Gordon Brown, was cryogenically frozen in May 2010 when he left office. Three years on, it has been heated up in the microwave of Osborne’s rhetoric and is being deployed by him with striking regularity. The Chancellor now uses the words “British values” as a shorthand to explain what drives his decisions to spend — and to cut.

When Osborne called the health service “the people’s priority”, he might have been channelling Tony Blair. Schools, the NHS and (more controversially) international development: these, the Chancellor says, are what matters most. Pensions and allowances for the retired and spending on servicemen and veterans — as opposed to Ministry of Defence officialdom — are also protected. The consequence is that, in practice, about 60 per cent of state spending is off the negotiating table — increasing the pressure upon other departments to find disproportionate savings. This is why the Spending Review went to the wire, as Vince Cable at Business and Philip Hammond at the MoD dug their heels in.

Reduced to its basics, the review proposed a fundamental duality. On the side of the angels are schools, the health service, those who need social care and military personnel; on the other are the bankers embroiled in the Libor scandal, welfare scroungers and covetous public sector unions that still benefit from “antiquated” pay structures. Miliband and Balls want to make the election a referendum upon the Coalition’s performance to date; Cameron and Osborne insist that it should be about the trajectory upon which their Government is already embarked and to which — they assert — the nation should stick.

The words “difficult decisions” or “tough choices” have now become a cliché, a grating euphemism. That said, looming over this limited exercise were some strategic questions that cannot be postponed indefinitely. In his statement, Osborne made clear that much deeper cuts to the welfare budget will be required soon enough — the new requirement on benefit claimants to learn English a taste of toughness to come — and, in addressing the issue of the winter fuel allowance for pensioners who live in hot countries, he took a first step towards a much broader audit of payments to the elderly.

A great reckoning on working-age benefits, longevity and the entitlements of the retired lies ahead. The long-term fiscal viability of UK plc depends upon it. But don’t expect comprehensive answers this side of the election. Osborne’s first Spending Review in 2010 was aimed squarely at the markets. His second was directed no less clearly at the electorate. What looked at first blush like an exercise in national book-keeping was better understood as a preliminary campaign appearance: less than two years before his greatest test, this is a Chancellor already on the hustings.